Post by Angela

Just checking in. I didn't realize Kris is keeping up with this blog. Cool.

I was just thinking about the fact that people keep telling us that we haven't been waiting all that long for our referral. Yes, that's true, but the overall adoption process has been REALLY long. We first started in 2004, as our fertility treatments were nearing the end. The last treatment cycle worked, which was great, even if it did mean we'd have to put the adoption off for awhile.

We probed about restarting adoption in mid-2005, only to be told that the country we had hoped to adopt from (Ukraine) was shutting down for a time. Shortly after that, Kris decided to leave the military, and it was a year & a half before he was out, into a civilian job, sold our other houses & into this one. Granted, it would've been hard to adopt another child when Cerri was so young, but our feelings were mixed, since we still felt drawn to adopt as we had intended.

Finally, last year (Dec 11, 2007) we went to an Adoption Expo in Washington and started over from scratch. We decided on a different country (Russia), chose a different agency (one that is local to us & has good post-adoption support). We didn't move very fast at first, but we decided on/applied to our agency in March and completed our homestudy paperchase done by June.

Completing our dossier took a little extra time, but we had it in by the early September. And now we wait & wait & wait.

So, we've been "waiting" since September, but we've been working on it for a year. And it's going on five years since we took our first real steps toward adoption. So, it really doesn't feel as though we "haven't been waiting all that long."

Well the waiting continues. We are still waiting for our referal even though it seems that nothing will be happening til the beginning of 2009. Oh well we can still hope. We did get one bit of good news that was we recieved our I-171H yesterday in the mail. So that is one less thing to worry about. At least we will be nearly done with dossier part 2 by the time we travel on trip 1.